29 ms·

Mainnet Merge Announcement

556 points by bowsamic 4y ago

meltyness 4y ago
If Ethereum is inflationary, and there is a minimum cost to staking, why would I ever begin to stake if I know that the cost can only go down in the future?
- rglullis 4y ago
  For starters, Ethereum is not inflationary. ETH is minted and burned according to network activity. The more people making transactions (and paying for them) the less ETH will be created. It can even get to the point where some blocks lead to a net burn of ETH. Why would you stake? Even if the returns were low (compared to what?), people like me are interested in staking merely to help secure the chain at a (relatively low) cost compared to PoW chains, and having an efficient and secure blockchain opens up other opportunities for profit. In my case, I am less interested in speculating with tokens and I am more interested in seeing a blockchain that can be an actual alternative for cross-border payments. I feel like by becoming a staker (and by working in projects that leverage layer-2 scaling networks [0]) I am contributing to that becoming a reality with a (relatively) low opportunity cost. [0]: https://hub20.io https://hub20.io
  - meltyness 4y ago
    I won't beat around the bush. What is an ETH worth? There are not details about the economics, just the ecosystem, which is replicated across more thoughtful platforms. I personally prefer Cardano, since the software itself has a better foundation, and the fixed supply implies some urgency in adoption. $53,731.20 is enough USD for me to keep my t2.micro up for 300 years, so is there some mathematical guarantee that means there's any value in adopting ETH immediately?
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Just so you know, plenty of people locked their ETH when it was well below $100. And for those that are joining now, but worry that the investment would be too big, consider the possibility of pooling resources with other people and stake using your own node. This is one the things that I would like to do next with Hub20, to help instance operators to pool together resources with their friends and to manage their validators... > so is there some mathematical guarantee that means there's any value in adopting ETH immediately? Guarantee? No, of course not.
      - meltyness 4y ago
        What you seem to be suggesting is that, there's some collective with an immutable interest in maintaining ETH-stability, ETH-usefulness?
        rglullis 4y ago
        1) Not specific to Ethereum, but to its goals. For me, turning a profit is secondary to the goal of having a permissionless and censorship-resistant way for cross-border payments. At the moment, I believe that Ethereum (as an ecosystem) is the closest to make that a reality because it has the largest developer mindshare and the Foundation seems to be the only one playing the long game. 2) I am not speaking as a "collective". I am speaking for myself, and I believe that there are others like me.
        meltyness 4y ago
        I did some digging and the principles are elucidated by vitalik on his blog.[0] The principles are based on the fact that proof of work is antisocial, impractical or unrealistic. The 6 times this was discussed last year[1] in the ethereum devs meeting on zoom might also be of-interest. [0]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/361 https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/361
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago
      > I personally prefer Cardano, since the software itself has a better foundation, and the fixed supply implies some urgency in adoption. I really liked Cardano, until I started trying to learn more about it and develop for it. It's way behind Ethereum in developer experience. The way funds are shuffled around between addresses for a wallet also makes it much harder to reason about (even though in theory the UTXO model is better than account-based for parallel processing of transactions). In actuality, I don't think it's more scalable than Ethereum, and the scaling solutions they're working on (which are years out IMO) are L2s, like with Ethereum. The tooling is also way behind Ethereum, and running a full wallet is incredibly resource-intensive. I'm still staking a lot of Cardano, but I think it's unlikely it will overtake Ethereum in value at this point.
bowsamic 4y ago
[quote] Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total Difficulty value. The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain – 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022. Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022. [/quote]
aliljet 4y ago
I've been eagerly waiting for this to happen for a while. Here's picking up GPUs at fire sales for months and maybe years to come.
- factorialboy 4y ago
  Isn't the whole point that outrageous processing power is no longer a prerequisite.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    Yep. So now you may be able to pick up GPUs for MSRP, unlike the last few years.
  - ru552 4y ago
    Yes, and all of the GPUs currently being used will be available at fire sale prices.
  - tingletech 4y ago
    right, so presumably there will be a lot of idle GPUs that miners will sell / less demand for new GPUs?
- TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
  But would you _want_ a GPU that had a former life as a cryptominer? Running all those computations 24/7 probably takes a bit out of the life expectancy.
  - haunter 4y ago
    You can replace the fans and repaste the die. I’m curious about the prices though like don’t expect anything firesale-y
  - ajaimk 4y ago
    Actually yes. Gpu miners undervolt their cards these days and mining is a consistent load on the cards. The mining cards experience less stress and wear compared to gaming.
revskill 4y ago
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  What's the benefit of a low-cost global consensus system...? Is this sarcasm? Or are you getting caught up in some version of politics?
  - codesnik 4y ago
    is it low cost, though?
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
      Compared to similarly functioning systems that are decentralized and distributed? Yes.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        Bitcoin and Etherium are probably amongst the most inefficient cryptocurrencies on the market.
        exo762 4y ago
        Is this analysis based on technical details of protocols? Or their economics? If latter, then I must object. Tx on one chain is not the same as tx on other chain. They are not interchangeable.
        idiotsecant 4y ago
        There are much cheaper ways to achieve consensus, so long as you don't care very much about that consensus being real.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      Low cost as in energy and computation, but the cost of transactions are still higher and transactions are still slower than some of the alternatives as far as I'm aware
rvz 4y ago
> Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake has been a loooong time coming. Thank you to everyone who contributed to researching, specifying, developing, analyzing, testing, breaking, fixing, or explaining everything that got us to The Merge. At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc. But I imagine that they will invent new problems and the critics will hastefully rush in with their low effort hot takes. The crypto supporters also need to hold their horses a bit on their claims of this 'taking over the current system' which is extremely unlikely to happen. Which ever side or view you are on in regards to crypto, The Merge seems to be undeniably a great spectacle of software architecture and this event has gone through a very regimented process and checks in upgrading components that handle billions of dollars worth of money. I await to see what happens next.
- muglug 4y ago
  As long as Bitcoin is still around crypto will have a heavy environmental asterisk attached to it. But, at least to me, this will make ethereum-based NFTs of interesting art a more morally-justifiable purchase.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    No, I think once ethereum goes PoS, average people will stop caring about the energy use of crypto because the public at large won’t be able to digest the nuance.
    - muglug 4y ago
      The average person with a computer in the US (just taking the country I live in) has never heard the words “proof of stake” or Ethereum. All the average person knows is that there were a bunch of Super Bowl commercials about “crypto”, and their cousin who spends a lot of time on the computer lost a lot of his parents money investing in a thing called “Bitcoin” last year.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    the existence of ethereum as proof-of-stake makes it impossible to stop proof-of-work coins via exchange regulation/etc. It's trivial to run exchanges on ethereum and therefore they largely exist outside any possibility of regulation. Previously you could sorta leverage this in via the exchanges/etc but now there is no possibility of ever banning the environmentally-harmful PoW coins.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps? Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends. edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nodes. I am talking about the class of people with the ability to declare that the people with stakes did not validate correctly and therefore lose their stakes. My understanding is that this is a very small number of people and is mostly just the ethereum foundation. edit edit: The term for this class is apparently called slashers, not validators.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  Yes it is incorrect. https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png Ethereum will be more decentralized after proof of stake. No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers.
  - luma 4y ago
    Instead you just need a massive amount of eth
    - Zamicol 4y ago
      Wouldn't those with ownership in a system be best trusted with the self-interest of such a system? That seems to be the best alignment of incentives.
      - luma 4y ago
        Sure, and Regular Money is best governed by billionaires. Incentives line up nicely if you're already rich.
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        What was the point of BTC and ETH then? We already have the system you describe with fiat currency and traditional banks.
pimterry 4y ago
This sets concrete trigger parameters for the switchover, which implies an approximate date, but not a well-defined hard deadline. If you're interested in the real progress, there's a helpful live timer tracking the countdown to that trigger & current switchover time estimates here: https://wenmerge.com/ https://wenmerge.com/
- cypress66 4y ago
  There's also http://bordel.wtf http://bordel.wtf which I think is more accurate
stockpricethrow 4y ago
How will this affect the revenue and stock prices of major hardware manufacturers? Particularly GPU manufacturers? If the price of GPU's drop due to a large second hand market opening up, would GPU manufacturers be hurt in any way?
- immibis 4y ago
  Nvidia is down almost 50%... from its high around Jan/Dec. I suspect people saw this coming from a mile away. If you think the effect is likely to be stronger or weaker than the market predicts, bet on it now.
  - drexlspivey 4y ago
    People stopped buying GPUs a while back, it makes no sense to buy a GPU for mining 6 months before the merge
    - sp332 4y ago
      It's true they stopped buying new ones, but now they won't have any reason to keep old ones either. I'm expecting (hoping for) a glut of previous-generation GPUs as miners close up shop.
      - johntb86 4y ago
        I've heard people warn that used gpus formerly used for mining might be a bad deal, since they've been run flat out 24/7. I don't know how true that is.
        ls612 4y ago
        The cores should be fine since they have usually been run undervolted at lower temperatures, but the memory has been more stressed than a gaming card’s memory.
        AlexandrB 4y ago
zelag 4y ago
I have a question, why was 32 ETH chosen for one to become a validator? Also, would this number change if value of ETH were to plummet?
- typingmonkey 4y ago
  Originally it was 3200 eth, but the price has risen too much.
  - drewp41 4y ago
    Not exactly. The main reason they reduced it to 32 ETH was because of BLS signatures, so a lot more validators could be in sync with each other But yeah, 32 ETH at the time of the Beacon chain starting was only a few thousand dollars
- drewp41 4y ago
  It’s basically the minimum amount of ETH needed to ensure there are a lot of validators all in sync. If it was less than 32 ETH, there would be way more validators and it would be very difficult for them to all sync to the correct block every 12 seconds.
- olalonde 4y ago
  https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/serenity_design_rationale#Why-32-ETH-validator-sizes https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/serenity_design_rationa...
davidy123 4y ago
Oh funny, I just, inspired by Stable Diffusion, ordered a 3090 ti at what I thought was a good price. Well, I have 30 days to see what happens… There could be an interesting ripple effect if GPUs become more widely available in general. «Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021.» (from https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-many-gpus-are-in-the-world-just-sitting-there-mining-crypto-all-day/#comment-14657808 https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...)
- camjw 4y ago
  Off-topic but have you got any recommendations on stuff to read to set up a GPU at home to run stable diffusion?
  - stavros 4y ago
    If you have a GPU that has more than 4 GB VRAM, you should be able to easily run it: https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion I didn't manage to run it on mine, as it segfaults, but I've heard of people running it fine on an old 1060 (which I have too).
    - yreg 4y ago
      Anyone tried on an intel Mac? I'm ok with Bootcamp.
      - squeaky-clean 4y ago
        I don't believe there's anything OS specific for it, just most guides are for Windows for simplicity. However it does require a nvidia gpu and Macs are generally AMD or integrated gpus.
        yreg 4y ago
        I believe there is some workaround for AMD as well, but I believe it will be a pain to set up on my machine. I have Radeon Pro 580, on Windows I even use the Adrenaline custom drivers… Getting VR to work was tiresome, so now I don't want to even start before I see someone else succeeded.
pearjuice 4y ago
Are there known cases of miners or other organizations resisting this transition? Will there be people left mining the old proof-of-work chain? Something like Ethereum Classic but for PoW.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Yes. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-pow/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-pow/
titaniumtown 4y ago
watch ethereum classic just pick up where ethereum left off lol
jbaczuk 4y ago
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large increase in energy costs or, in Europe’s case, an impending energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine.
  - rglover 4y ago
    - survirtual 4y ago
      Exactly. We’ve had over 50 years to transition off of oil and onto nuclear / electric infrastructure. Instead of that, the world leaders sat with their thumbs in ass on yachts, coked out orgies, and mc-mansions on humanities dime, slurping a gravy train that lasts a generation or two because “who cares what happens after I’m gone”. Now the bell of death tolls and it is suddenly “everyone who has been locked up with no say”’s problem. People were duped and trusted greedy imbeciles with resource allocation, and then have to bail the same morons out. PoW binds value to unavoidable physics. Clean up your energy or your planet dies. Increase compute capabilities or you will be left behind by others that do. It forces progress. PoS binds value to rich people’s ballsacks. It results in no physical value binding, and is a digital continuation of the incompetent making resource allocation decisions — leading humanity right off a cliff. I just don’t get how we can have all knowledge at our fingertips and humanity is still this bad at decision making.
    - marshray 4y ago
      > All of the world's problems are government-created Earthquakes? Dandelions? Sunburn? Marital infidelity?
      - rglover 4y ago
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
djschnei 4y ago
let's just rebrand it JPMcoin and get this charade over with already...
swamp40 4y ago
My suspicion is that Ethereum got so popular because there were so many ways to make money from it. Basically a cash cow for developers and miners. Does anyone know where the money making opportunities will shift to with POS? Block builders? Validators? I suspect the amount of money to be made through MEV will dramatically decrease.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  The money making opportunities will be in waiting for the next bullrun, then just forking the biggest ongoing trend onto a new and upcoming chain. You don't have to create anything of lasting value. Just time the market and you can make wild money without doing any real work.
- stiltzkin 4y ago
  Don't have the numbers here but last I read you can retire staking with just 3 validators.
  - tyrust 4y ago
    This site has a calculator: https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0/ https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0/ Running three of your own validators gets you $7,333 a year. You'd have to be in a pretty low cost of living area for that to work.
    - dannyw 4y ago
      1. Yield is increasing to 7% - 12% after the merge, as validators will now earn transaction fees, and MEV if configured. This increases it to approx $18k a year. 2. This is assuming 1 ETH = $1650. If the Ethereum price doubles (but still under the ATH), you'd be at $36k a year; not enough for Cali or NYC (perhaps if you own your home?) but certainly fine for cheaper COL states.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      How involved is running a validator? If it can just run off in the corner -- living somewhere cheap and doing small scale contracting for fun or whatever could be a neat lifestyle.
api 4y ago
I have to say I'm very surprised, and I'm curious to see how this plays out. PoW must die, but I have a hard time seeing how this won't lock up a ton of currency and create its own plutocracy. Of course I suppose an argument could be made that a "least privilege plutocracy" with aligned interests is not as bad as many alternatives.
- dcolkitt 4y ago
  Why would this be any more plutocratic than any other capitalist economy? It's a mechanism where you can lock up ETH and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.9% today). Similarly the US dollar has treasury bonds where you can lock up USD and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.4% today).
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    That brings up an interesting point. Would PoS rewards get adjusted with central bank interest rates? If not, isn't there a risk of validators fleeing for better returns elsewhere?
    - rcxdude 4y ago
      If they do rates will go up. So in that sense it's self-levelling. And the rate corresponding to the minimum secure number of stakers is likely extremely high.
    - exo762 4y ago
      Absolutely. But validator block rewards are automatically adjusted to compensate for that.
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      Yes, they get adjusted- by the market, the best adjuster there is! If you can make more investing in low-risk bonds you will do that. If you make more investing in ETH staking you will do that. Eventually it will more or less look like the bond market in terms of value.
- 4y ago
benreesman 4y ago
Show HN: Proof of Work System Based on Hashing Comments of People Who Hate Crypto but Won’t Stop Talking About It
- sph 4y ago
  I wonder how much energy is wasted by transmitting and storing messages of users complaining about Bitcoin's energy usage.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    No doubt an inconsequential amount just like bitcoin's impact of less than 0.5% of world energy usage.
bluelightning2k 4y ago
I can be anti-crypto and still appreciate this. First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. (Although having the impact to begin with is another story.) Secondly from a sheer technical coordination perspective there's a feeling of pulling off a complex dance. Makes it hard for any of us to claim our workloads aren't testable!
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. How long until BTC follows suit?
  - chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago
    Probably never. Bitcoin is famously conservative in comparison to other blockchain projects.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Judging by the BTC maxis on this thread and all the FUD they are spreading, never. If I have to make a bet, though, I think that what will happen is that financial institutions will start pushing for the idea of wrapping BTC on the Ethereum blockchain, and once it reaches a certain threshold (let's say 80%) they will campaign to drop the bitcoin PoW altogether. But this is a conversation that bitcoiners are not ready to have, yet.
    - exo762 4y ago
      There is an amazing proposal [0] on building trustless bridge for BTC on Ethereum. Leona Hioki is GOAT. [0] https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge-creation-with-witness-encryption/11953 https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge-creation-wit...
      - swalsh 4y ago
        Check out btc.b on Avalanche. Already exists.
erwinh 4y ago
What we see in the Tezos chain (liquid/delegated proof-of-stake) is that big custodial wallets for the exchanges have grown to be the largest block bakers: https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producers-tsr-weekly-16-22 https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producer... With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that exchanges will market a 'stake your eth' feature.
- zionic 4y ago
  ETH PoS includes offline penalties proportional to the % of the network that goes down. If your home RasPi validator drops you don't lose much. If 25% of users stake on coinbase and _they_ go down the penalties are much higher. So there's an incentive to validate on your own hardware/connection.
  - mattnewton 4y ago
    If that were true why wouldn’t coinbase just stake through a few hundred different vms on servers instead of one block of nodes? Or is there some mechanism that ties it to a legal person / corporation?
- chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago
  Coinbase is already offering an eth staking service: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/coinbase-earn/eth-2-0-staking https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/co... It remains to be seen how much further staking will centralize. So far the distribution isn't so bad: https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png
  - warkdarrior 4y ago
    There are fewer staking pools in that chart than there are traditional banks in the US! https://www.statista.com/statistics/184536/number-of-fdic-insured-us-commercial-bank-institutions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184536/number-of-fdic-in...
leashless 4y ago
In 2015 I wrote the Ethereum Foundation blog post detailing the phases of the release. In those days the Proof of State transition was known as Serenity. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process... here is the blog post.
- proto-n 4y ago
  Any details on what changed since serenity?
- RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
  Could you perhaps please answer this Ask HN thread I have posted: "Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a post-Merge client?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172 TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you'll need 2 pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one are only developed by various seemingly commercial entities.
  - stablefusion 4y ago
    Thr udeal scenario would be for ethereum foundation to keep becoming more and more irrelevant. Why would they take on 'more' responsibility if the goal is decentralisation? afaik, all clients are open source projects. And many are being funded by gitcoin grants now(crowdsourcing)
    - RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
      Because they earned $ 1 billion with the Ether presale [0], and if the community gives a billion dollars to a non-profit, the non-profit ought to deliver a usable product from that, not hide behind some handwaving of why that's the job of other people. If they deliver a usable product that doesn't prevent anyone else from also doing so and thus achieving decentralization. But it would mean that they actually do their job for the billion they were given. [0] Calculated with today's Ether price, based on: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-foundation-holds-13b-in-ether-300m-in-non-crypto-investments/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...
yuan43 4y ago
It's a brilliant plan really. First, the Ethereum foundation premines the entire supply of ether, then distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale and the rest to miners. Eventually the Foundation produces an upgrade that replaces mining with validators posting collateral in the form of the very token that was premined. What the announcement doesn't say is how similar Ethereum will become to Ripple post-merge. Yes Ripple doesn't have anywhere near the fancy contract capabilities of Ethereum, nor does it have the concept of validators posting collateral or getting rewards. But in terms of where the power resides and the existence of major chokepoints, they're both very similar.
- everfree 4y ago
  > distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale Why the quotes? Did you miss the public launch announcement in 2015?
xyst 4y ago
bullish outlook. Heavily loaded up when ETH was at <$1K.
- arez 4y ago
  nobody cares what you bought
  - stiltzkin 4y ago
    neither your comment.
kkielhofner 4y ago
What surprises me most about the Ethereum ecosystem is the software and release engineering of the implementations, especially the reference (now execution layer) go-ethereum. As has been noted elsewhere "the merge" has been in progress for years. Here we are approximately three weeks out and just this morning the (allegedly) working merge ready go-ethereum client was released. Given that the Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for 9/6 this gives the approximately 4500 Ethereum nodes (of which 3381 are geth)[0] 10 days to update... It also doesn't help that they botched the prior release (two days ago) of the geth client that had a nasty corruption issue that requires a little more than the update warning footnote in this release to fix[1]. Many people who deployed 1.10.22 are re-syncing from (almost) scratch. Even if you followed Prysm and the other Beacon implementations the deployment and configuration changes required are non-trivial[2] and again, the v3 release referenced in this announcement was only released two days ago! As someone who runs Ethereum nodes I'm a little gun shy at this point deploying new releases of this stack, especially given how things have gone the past two days. Even with our relatively trivial application this gives little time for any testing or assurance process. It's amazing to me given the stakes (value of the Ethereum chain) and complexity (huge) node operators are essentially in the position of waiting until mere days (or hours) to upgrade their nodes and as noted - there are thousands of us around the world. IMO this is yet another indication that the real issue with regard to decentralization of blockchain solutions is the fact that (as pointed out by Moxie and others) the vast majority of the real users and platforms of Ethereum interact with the chain via a handful of centralized node providers (Alchemy, Infura, etc). Who can blame them given what a mess this is? I'm also not picking on Ethereum specifically, the same things could be said about most of the other chains and implementations I've interacted with. Given the hype, promise, age, and value in the blockchain ecosystem the software itself makes Apache circa 1996 look like mature, rock solid software. BTW, the Ethereum Foundation alone holds approximately $1.6B in assets[3] and investors have poured tens of billions of dollars in this ecosystem. IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're wanting for resources to do this right. [0] - https://ethernodes.org/ https://ethernodes.org/ [1] - https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases [2] - https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prepare-for-merge https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prepare-for-merge [3] - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-foundation-holds-13b-in-ether-300m-in-non-crypto-investments/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...
rcarmo 4y ago
Thank goodness. I have been waiting for this to happen so I can consider building a couple of GPU powered machines at non-outrageous prices, and it seems that savvy miners have already begun selling part of their gear early.
overtonwhy 4y ago
And now there's a split where the miners keep mining and everybody gets a new duplicate coin account and the grifters cash out more?
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  No.
  - overtonwhy 4y ago
    Look up Ethereum Classic. It is still running. Why is this any different?
tempnow987 4y ago
Ethernet is in the 12,000 megawatt energy usage range? Pretty impressive - and will be a nice savings if that energy usage goes away.
- coolspot 4y ago
  Ethernet? 12 GW? Maybe old coaxial 10Mbit cards.
targ65 4y ago
What are the chances that this doesn't end in disaster? Honest question.
- endorphine 4y ago
  Can you provide some examples?
- everfree 4y ago
  Chances are high that it will not end in disaster, in my opinion. They've simulated the switchover dozens of times on a diverse set of networks, including development ("shadow") forks of the main network itself.
- dsimmons 4y ago
  Many/most people "in the know" peg it somewhere in the ballpark of ~90-95% chance of success from what I've seen.
idiotsecant 4y ago
In this thread: A million crypto tribalists whatabouting and clutching pearls and absolutely nobody talking about what this is - a pretty cool organizational and technical achievement. Fantastically well done to the cat herders and cats that we call the Ethereum dev community, this is a prime example of how things can get done not by relying on the profit motive of a large corporation of the interests or a nation-state, but on the genuine belief in the soundness of an idea and a willingness to work together to change the world.
- naltun 4y ago
  Nicely said.
- hartAtWork 4y ago
  Amen
nailer 4y ago
If you were wondering: "The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees. " https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/
- AgentME 4y ago
  There are some old articles that get this wrong, because years ago it was planned that sharding support would get added at the same time as the shift to PoS (in an upgraded called "Eth2"), and sharding support would result in lower gas fees. Some articles mixed up the benefits of sharding and PoS with each other. But now sharding has been delayed so that the move to PoS could be prioritized.
jacobn 4y ago
Has there been any resolution to the issues raised in https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560070819518234624.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560070819518234624.html ? My reading of the concerns is that USDC has effective fork veto, and that with PoS the chain would be subject to OFAC, which would effectively destroy it. (my reading may well be incorrect / the concerns irrelevant)
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  If being subject to OFAC oversight would "destroy" Ethereum, then Ethereum should be destroyed.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Why is that? OFAC is a US government agency, Ethereum is not a US-based organization. Why should they be forced to follow US laws? There are plenty of us outside of the US who do not care about what's illegal in the US or not.
    - brobinson 4y ago
      You're misunderstanding his post. He's saying that if such a US-centric thing threatens the entire system, the system shouldn't exist at all. It will have failed at its mission to be decentralized and thus has no reason to exist.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      He's saying cryptocurrencies should be bigger than the US government. The system should be so resilient that there is no way for the USA or anyone else to intervene no matter how much they want to.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jcfrei 4y ago
  If the majority of validators adhere to OFAC regulations then your chance of getting a transaction approved that violates OFAC drops. Anybody can be a validator but if the majority of validators choose to adhere to these rules then that's what you end up with. Crypto isn't successful because it creates some anarcho-capitalist alternative universe (though that was the initial impetus). And the die-hard bitcoin followers who believe so are slowly seeing their market cap falling below that of ether.
Seattle3503 4y ago
Does staking make Etherium deflationary? (or make it more deflationary if it already is)
- everfree 4y ago
  According to ultrasound.money, Ethereum's current 30d inflation rate is 4.1% annualized. If the merge were already behind us (flip the "simulate merge" switch), inflation would be 0.1%. So, not quite deflationary but pretty close. If Ethereum network usage picks up again like it did in 2021, Ethereum will experience long stretches of time where it is deflationary. https://ultrasound.money/ https://ultrasound.money/
  - coolspot 4y ago
    Not sure this is correct. PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year, which can be offset with burn rate, but it is at 0.5% now. The site projects that in 200 years, burn and issuance will be at equilibrium.
    - everfree 4y ago
      > PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year PoS issuance is 4.6%/year per staked ETH. Only 14M of the total 120M ETH are staked right now, making the real issuance only 0.5%/year when taken as a percentage of total ETH supply. Subtract the 0.5% burn rate from that 0.5% real issuance rate (with rounding errors), and that's how you get Ethereum's current situation of being "pretty close" to deflationary.
      - coolspot 4y ago
        Thank you for explaining! Will gas fees burn or go to stakers?
        everfree 4y ago
        Part is burned, part goes to stakers. EIP-1559 is the Ethereum patch that introduced the fee burn in Aug 2021. It's a bit complex, but basically speaking, the higher demand is for the network, the more expensive transactions become and the more ETH gets burned.
dang 4y ago
Related. Others? The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 - Aug 2022 (387 comments) Proof-of-Stake is better than Proof-of-Work; the Merge won’t fix other problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 - Aug 2022 (44 comments) “The Merge,” the biggest change in Ethereum history - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 - Aug 2022 (15 comments) The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519340 - Aug 2022 (175 comments) Ethereum merge on schedule after successful Goerli test merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429380 - Aug 2022 (1 comment) Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of-stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32427992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32427992 - Aug 2022 (310 comments) Will GPU mining end after the Merge (formerly called ETH 2.0)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048468 - July 2022 (35 comments) Ethereum Proof-of-Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012352 - July 2022 (326 comments) Ethereum mining is going away, and miners are not happy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31772418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31772418 - June 2022 (23 comments) Why Proof of Stake? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006793 - Nov 2020 (35 comments) Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814409 - Jan 2019 (11 comments) Proof of Stake or Proof of Work, What's the Difference? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369593 - Nov 2018 (107 comments) Ethereum Foundation Releases Alpha Casper Proof of Stake Testnet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042070 - Dec 2017 (199 comments) Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054903 - Aug 2017 (120 comments) Proof of Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13001511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13001511 - Nov 2016 (77 comments) Long Read: Alternatives for Proof of Work, Part 1: Proof of Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091773 - Aug 2015 (3 comments)
- sfjailbird 4y ago
  The news here is that there is now a (sort of) fixed date (next month!). Not really related to general stories about the merge or proof-of-stake, imho.
yyyk 4y ago
If this works well enough, I wonder how long before governments decide to straight up ban large PoW chains.
IncRnd 4y ago
If anyone wonders why many "regular people" are uncertain about doing anything with cryptocurrencies, look at the top of this article for the reason. It's not that people are incapable of understanding the subject, but that the purveyors of the subject constantly coin new words and meanings. * Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total Difficulty value. * The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain – 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. * The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022. * Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022.
- simpleblend 4y ago
  1. This is mostly for developers 2. The iPhone was once new. Electric vehicles were once new. People will adapt.
- dsimmons 4y ago
  To be fair, I think this is mainly aimed at developers (and ETH ecosystem developers specifically). While I don't disagree that there's a "vocabulary" problem (e.g. "dank-sharding"), in a perfect world, a normie would largely just interact with an application without needing to know any of this.
  - beambot 4y ago
    Spot on: This underlying infrastructure isn't meant for "regular people", it's meant for the people who directly build atop it. By way of example from TradFi, the news updates from SWIFT about ISO-20022 is similarly laden with jargon: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/iso-20022-bytes-payments-less-six-months-till-cbpr-general-go-live https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/iso-20022-bytes-payme...
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    You say that from the standpoint of readers at this HN blog page, but this blog post is the top blog post and first one seen on https://blog.ethereum.org/ https://blog.ethereum.org/. Many people who want to understand what they are looking at prior to purchase would look at this page and quickly close it, never to invest using etherium. Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every page on the website (or app store) is filled with made-up jargon? That's the issue that I see here.
hartAtWork 4y ago
Can I unstake my staked eth after this merge?
- wmf 4y ago
  No, you have to wait for a future protocol upgrade.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  Nope.

556 points by bowsamic 4y ago

If Ethereum is inflationary, and there is a minimum cost to staking, why would I ever begin to stake if I know that the cost can only go down in the future?

rglullis 4y ago
For starters, Ethereum is not inflationary. ETH is minted and burned according to network activity. The more people making transactions (and paying for them) the less ETH will be created. It can even get to the point where some blocks lead to a net burn of ETH. Why would you stake? Even if the returns were low (compared to what?), people like me are interested in staking merely to help secure the chain at a (relatively low) cost compared to PoW chains, and having an efficient and secure blockchain opens up other opportunities for profit. In my case, I am less interested in speculating with tokens and I am more interested in seeing a blockchain that can be an actual alternative for cross-border payments. I feel like by becoming a staker (and by working in projects that leverage layer-2 scaling networks [0]) I am contributing to that becoming a reality with a (relatively) low opportunity cost. [0]: https://hub20.io https://hub20.io
- meltyness 4y ago
  I won't beat around the bush. What is an ETH worth? There are not details about the economics, just the ecosystem, which is replicated across more thoughtful platforms. I personally prefer Cardano, since the software itself has a better foundation, and the fixed supply implies some urgency in adoption. $53,731.20 is enough USD for me to keep my t2.micro up for 300 years, so is there some mathematical guarantee that means there's any value in adopting ETH immediately?
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Just so you know, plenty of people locked their ETH when it was well below $100. And for those that are joining now, but worry that the investment would be too big, consider the possibility of pooling resources with other people and stake using your own node. This is one the things that I would like to do next with Hub20, to help instance operators to pool together resources with their friends and to manage their validators... > so is there some mathematical guarantee that means there's any value in adopting ETH immediately? Guarantee? No, of course not.
    - meltyness 4y ago
      What you seem to be suggesting is that, there's some collective with an immutable interest in maintaining ETH-stability, ETH-usefulness?
      - rglullis 4y ago
        1) Not specific to Ethereum, but to its goals. For me, turning a profit is secondary to the goal of having a permissionless and censorship-resistant way for cross-border payments. At the moment, I believe that Ethereum (as an ecosystem) is the closest to make that a reality because it has the largest developer mindshare and the Foundation seems to be the only one playing the long game. 2) I am not speaking as a "collective". I am speaking for myself, and I believe that there are others like me.
        meltyness 4y ago
        I did some digging and the principles are elucidated by vitalik on his blog.[0] The principles are based on the fact that proof of work is antisocial, impractical or unrealistic. The 6 times this was discussed last year[1] in the ethereum devs meeting on zoom might also be of-interest. [0]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/361 https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/361
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    > I personally prefer Cardano, since the software itself has a better foundation, and the fixed supply implies some urgency in adoption. I really liked Cardano, until I started trying to learn more about it and develop for it. It's way behind Ethereum in developer experience. The way funds are shuffled around between addresses for a wallet also makes it much harder to reason about (even though in theory the UTXO model is better than account-based for parallel processing of transactions). In actuality, I don't think it's more scalable than Ethereum, and the scaling solutions they're working on (which are years out IMO) are L2s, like with Ethereum. The tooling is also way behind Ethereum, and running a full wallet is incredibly resource-intensive. I'm still staking a lot of Cardano, but I think it's unlikely it will overtake Ethereum in value at this point.

bowsamic 4y ago

[quote] Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total Difficulty value. The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain – 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022. Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022. [/quote]

aliljet 4y ago

I've been eagerly waiting for this to happen for a while. Here's picking up GPUs at fire sales for months and maybe years to come.

factorialboy 4y ago
Isn't the whole point that outrageous processing power is no longer a prerequisite.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Yep. So now you may be able to pick up GPUs for MSRP, unlike the last few years.
- ru552 4y ago
  Yes, and all of the GPUs currently being used will be available at fire sale prices.
- tingletech 4y ago
  right, so presumably there will be a lot of idle GPUs that miners will sell / less demand for new GPUs?
TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
But would you _want_ a GPU that had a former life as a cryptominer? Running all those computations 24/7 probably takes a bit out of the life expectancy.
- haunter 4y ago
  You can replace the fans and repaste the die. I’m curious about the prices though like don’t expect anything firesale-y
- ajaimk 4y ago
  Actually yes. Gpu miners undervolt their cards these days and mining is a consistent load on the cards. The mining cards experience less stress and wear compared to gaming.

revskill 4y ago

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
What's the benefit of a low-cost global consensus system...? Is this sarcasm? Or are you getting caught up in some version of politics?
- codesnik 4y ago
  is it low cost, though?
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
    Compared to similarly functioning systems that are decentralized and distributed? Yes.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      Bitcoin and Etherium are probably amongst the most inefficient cryptocurrencies on the market.
      - exo762 4y ago
        Is this analysis based on technical details of protocols? Or their economics? If latter, then I must object. Tx on one chain is not the same as tx on other chain. They are not interchangeable.
      - idiotsecant 4y ago
        There are much cheaper ways to achieve consensus, so long as you don't care very much about that consensus being real.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Low cost as in energy and computation, but the cost of transactions are still higher and transactions are still slower than some of the alternatives as far as I'm aware

rvz 4y ago

> Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake has been a loooong time coming. Thank you to everyone who contributed to researching, specifying, developing, analyzing, testing, breaking, fixing, or explaining everything that got us to The Merge. At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc. But I imagine that they will invent new problems and the critics will hastefully rush in with their low effort hot takes. The crypto supporters also need to hold their horses a bit on their claims of this 'taking over the current system' which is extremely unlikely to happen. Which ever side or view you are on in regards to crypto, The Merge seems to be undeniably a great spectacle of software architecture and this event has gone through a very regimented process and checks in upgrading components that handle billions of dollars worth of money. I await to see what happens next.

muglug 4y ago
As long as Bitcoin is still around crypto will have a heavy environmental asterisk attached to it. But, at least to me, this will make ethereum-based NFTs of interesting art a more morally-justifiable purchase.
- gfodor 4y ago
  No, I think once ethereum goes PoS, average people will stop caring about the energy use of crypto because the public at large won’t be able to digest the nuance.
  - muglug 4y ago
    The average person with a computer in the US (just taking the country I live in) has never heard the words “proof of stake” or Ethereum. All the average person knows is that there were a bunch of Super Bowl commercials about “crypto”, and their cousin who spends a lot of time on the computer lost a lot of his parents money investing in a thing called “Bitcoin” last year.
- paulmd 4y ago
  the existence of ethereum as proof-of-stake makes it impossible to stop proof-of-work coins via exchange regulation/etc. It's trivial to run exchanges on ethereum and therefore they largely exist outside any possibility of regulation. Previously you could sorta leverage this in via the exchanges/etc but now there is no possibility of ever banning the environmentally-harmful PoW coins.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps? Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends. edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nodes. I am talking about the class of people with the ability to declare that the people with stakes did not validate correctly and therefore lose their stakes. My understanding is that this is a very small number of people and is mostly just the ethereum foundation. edit edit: The term for this class is apparently called slashers, not validators.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Yes it is incorrect. https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png Ethereum will be more decentralized after proof of stake. No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers.
- luma 4y ago
  Instead you just need a massive amount of eth
  - Zamicol 4y ago
    Wouldn't those with ownership in a system be best trusted with the self-interest of such a system? That seems to be the best alignment of incentives.
    - luma 4y ago
      Sure, and Regular Money is best governed by billionaires. Incentives line up nicely if you're already rich.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      What was the point of BTC and ETH then? We already have the system you describe with fiat currency and traditional banks.

pimterry 4y ago

This sets concrete trigger parameters for the switchover, which implies an approximate date, but not a well-defined hard deadline. If you're interested in the real progress, there's a helpful live timer tracking the countdown to that trigger & current switchover time estimates here: https://wenmerge.com/ https://wenmerge.com/

cypress66 4y ago
There's also http://bordel.wtf http://bordel.wtf which I think is more accurate

stockpricethrow 4y ago

How will this affect the revenue and stock prices of major hardware manufacturers? Particularly GPU manufacturers? If the price of GPU's drop due to a large second hand market opening up, would GPU manufacturers be hurt in any way?

immibis 4y ago
Nvidia is down almost 50%... from its high around Jan/Dec. I suspect people saw this coming from a mile away. If you think the effect is likely to be stronger or weaker than the market predicts, bet on it now.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  People stopped buying GPUs a while back, it makes no sense to buy a GPU for mining 6 months before the merge
  - sp332 4y ago
    It's true they stopped buying new ones, but now they won't have any reason to keep old ones either. I'm expecting (hoping for) a glut of previous-generation GPUs as miners close up shop.
    - johntb86 4y ago
      I've heard people warn that used gpus formerly used for mining might be a bad deal, since they've been run flat out 24/7. I don't know how true that is.
      - ls612 4y ago
        The cores should be fine since they have usually been run undervolted at lower temperatures, but the memory has been more stressed than a gaming card’s memory.
      - AlexandrB 4y ago

zelag 4y ago

I have a question, why was 32 ETH chosen for one to become a validator? Also, would this number change if value of ETH were to plummet?

typingmonkey 4y ago
Originally it was 3200 eth, but the price has risen too much.
- drewp41 4y ago
  Not exactly. The main reason they reduced it to 32 ETH was because of BLS signatures, so a lot more validators could be in sync with each other But yeah, 32 ETH at the time of the Beacon chain starting was only a few thousand dollars
drewp41 4y ago
It’s basically the minimum amount of ETH needed to ensure there are a lot of validators all in sync. If it was less than 32 ETH, there would be way more validators and it would be very difficult for them to all sync to the correct block every 12 seconds.
olalonde 4y ago
https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/serenity_design_rationale#Why-32-ETH-validator-sizes https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/serenity_design_rationa...

davidy123 4y ago

Oh funny, I just, inspired by Stable Diffusion, ordered a 3090 ti at what I thought was a good price. Well, I have 30 days to see what happens… There could be an interesting ripple effect if GPUs become more widely available in general. «Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021.» (from https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-many-gpus-are-in-the-world-just-sitting-there-mining-crypto-all-day/#comment-14657808 https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...)

camjw 4y ago
Off-topic but have you got any recommendations on stuff to read to set up a GPU at home to run stable diffusion?
- stavros 4y ago
  If you have a GPU that has more than 4 GB VRAM, you should be able to easily run it: https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion I didn't manage to run it on mine, as it segfaults, but I've heard of people running it fine on an old 1060 (which I have too).
  - yreg 4y ago
    Anyone tried on an intel Mac? I'm ok with Bootcamp.
    - squeaky-clean 4y ago
      I don't believe there's anything OS specific for it, just most guides are for Windows for simplicity. However it does require a nvidia gpu and Macs are generally AMD or integrated gpus.
      - yreg 4y ago
        I believe there is some workaround for AMD as well, but I believe it will be a pain to set up on my machine. I have Radeon Pro 580, on Windows I even use the Adrenaline custom drivers… Getting VR to work was tiresome, so now I don't want to even start before I see someone else succeeded.

pearjuice 4y ago

Are there known cases of miners or other organizations resisting this transition? Will there be people left mining the old proof-of-work chain? Something like Ethereum Classic but for PoW.

dboreham 4y ago
Yes. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-pow/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-pow/

titaniumtown 4y ago

watch ethereum classic just pick up where ethereum left off lol

jbaczuk 4y ago

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large increase in energy costs or, in Europe’s case, an impending energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine.
- rglover 4y ago
  - survirtual 4y ago
    Exactly. We’ve had over 50 years to transition off of oil and onto nuclear / electric infrastructure. Instead of that, the world leaders sat with their thumbs in ass on yachts, coked out orgies, and mc-mansions on humanities dime, slurping a gravy train that lasts a generation or two because “who cares what happens after I’m gone”. Now the bell of death tolls and it is suddenly “everyone who has been locked up with no say”’s problem. People were duped and trusted greedy imbeciles with resource allocation, and then have to bail the same morons out. PoW binds value to unavoidable physics. Clean up your energy or your planet dies. Increase compute capabilities or you will be left behind by others that do. It forces progress. PoS binds value to rich people’s ballsacks. It results in no physical value binding, and is a digital continuation of the incompetent making resource allocation decisions — leading humanity right off a cliff. I just don’t get how we can have all knowledge at our fingertips and humanity is still this bad at decision making.
  - marshray 4y ago
    > All of the world's problems are government-created Earthquakes? Dandelions? Sunburn? Marital infidelity?
    - rglover 4y ago

Linda703 4y ago

[dead]

djschnei 4y ago

let's just rebrand it JPMcoin and get this charade over with already...

swamp40 4y ago

My suspicion is that Ethereum got so popular because there were so many ways to make money from it. Basically a cash cow for developers and miners. Does anyone know where the money making opportunities will shift to with POS? Block builders? Validators? I suspect the amount of money to be made through MEV will dramatically decrease.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
The money making opportunities will be in waiting for the next bullrun, then just forking the biggest ongoing trend onto a new and upcoming chain. You don't have to create anything of lasting value. Just time the market and you can make wild money without doing any real work.
stiltzkin 4y ago
Don't have the numbers here but last I read you can retire staking with just 3 validators.
- tyrust 4y ago
  This site has a calculator: https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0/ https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0/ Running three of your own validators gets you $7,333 a year. You'd have to be in a pretty low cost of living area for that to work.
  - dannyw 4y ago
    1. Yield is increasing to 7% - 12% after the merge, as validators will now earn transaction fees, and MEV if configured. This increases it to approx $18k a year. 2. This is assuming 1 ETH = $1650. If the Ethereum price doubles (but still under the ATH), you'd be at $36k a year; not enough for Cali or NYC (perhaps if you own your home?) but certainly fine for cheaper COL states.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    How involved is running a validator? If it can just run off in the corner -- living somewhere cheap and doing small scale contracting for fun or whatever could be a neat lifestyle.

api 4y ago

I have to say I'm very surprised, and I'm curious to see how this plays out. PoW must die, but I have a hard time seeing how this won't lock up a ton of currency and create its own plutocracy. Of course I suppose an argument could be made that a "least privilege plutocracy" with aligned interests is not as bad as many alternatives.

dcolkitt 4y ago
Why would this be any more plutocratic than any other capitalist economy? It's a mechanism where you can lock up ETH and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.9% today). Similarly the US dollar has treasury bonds where you can lock up USD and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.4% today).
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  That brings up an interesting point. Would PoS rewards get adjusted with central bank interest rates? If not, isn't there a risk of validators fleeing for better returns elsewhere?
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    If they do rates will go up. So in that sense it's self-levelling. And the rate corresponding to the minimum secure number of stakers is likely extremely high.
  - exo762 4y ago
    Absolutely. But validator block rewards are automatically adjusted to compensate for that.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    Yes, they get adjusted- by the market, the best adjuster there is! If you can make more investing in low-risk bonds you will do that. If you make more investing in ETH staking you will do that. Eventually it will more or less look like the bond market in terms of value.
4y ago

benreesman 4y ago

Show HN: Proof of Work System Based on Hashing Comments of People Who Hate Crypto but Won’t Stop Talking About It

sph 4y ago
I wonder how much energy is wasted by transmitting and storing messages of users complaining about Bitcoin's energy usage.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  No doubt an inconsequential amount just like bitcoin's impact of less than 0.5% of world energy usage.

bluelightning2k 4y ago

I can be anti-crypto and still appreciate this. First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. (Although having the impact to begin with is another story.) Secondly from a sheer technical coordination perspective there's a feeling of pulling off a complex dance. Makes it hard for any of us to claim our workloads aren't testable!

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. How long until BTC follows suit?
- chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago
  Probably never. Bitcoin is famously conservative in comparison to other blockchain projects.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Judging by the BTC maxis on this thread and all the FUD they are spreading, never. If I have to make a bet, though, I think that what will happen is that financial institutions will start pushing for the idea of wrapping BTC on the Ethereum blockchain, and once it reaches a certain threshold (let's say 80%) they will campaign to drop the bitcoin PoW altogether. But this is a conversation that bitcoiners are not ready to have, yet.
  - exo762 4y ago
    There is an amazing proposal [0] on building trustless bridge for BTC on Ethereum. Leona Hioki is GOAT. [0] https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge-creation-with-witness-encryption/11953 https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge-creation-wit...
    - swalsh 4y ago
      Check out btc.b on Avalanche. Already exists.

erwinh 4y ago

What we see in the Tezos chain (liquid/delegated proof-of-stake) is that big custodial wallets for the exchanges have grown to be the largest block bakers: https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producers-tsr-weekly-16-22 https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producer... With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that exchanges will market a 'stake your eth' feature.

zionic 4y ago
ETH PoS includes offline penalties proportional to the % of the network that goes down. If your home RasPi validator drops you don't lose much. If 25% of users stake on coinbase and _they_ go down the penalties are much higher. So there's an incentive to validate on your own hardware/connection.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  If that were true why wouldn’t coinbase just stake through a few hundred different vms on servers instead of one block of nodes? Or is there some mechanism that ties it to a legal person / corporation?
chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago
Coinbase is already offering an eth staking service: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/coinbase-earn/eth-2-0-staking https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/co... It remains to be seen how much further staking will centralize. So far the distribution isn't so bad: https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  There are fewer staking pools in that chart than there are traditional banks in the US! https://www.statista.com/statistics/184536/number-of-fdic-insured-us-commercial-bank-institutions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184536/number-of-fdic-in...

leashless 4y ago

In 2015 I wrote the Ethereum Foundation blog post detailing the phases of the release. In those days the Proof of State transition was known as Serenity. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process... here is the blog post.

proto-n 4y ago
Any details on what changed since serenity?
RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
Could you perhaps please answer this Ask HN thread I have posted: "Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a post-Merge client?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172 TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you'll need 2 pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one are only developed by various seemingly commercial entities.
- stablefusion 4y ago
  Thr udeal scenario would be for ethereum foundation to keep becoming more and more irrelevant. Why would they take on 'more' responsibility if the goal is decentralisation? afaik, all clients are open source projects. And many are being funded by gitcoin grants now(crowdsourcing)
  - RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
    Because they earned $ 1 billion with the Ether presale [0], and if the community gives a billion dollars to a non-profit, the non-profit ought to deliver a usable product from that, not hide behind some handwaving of why that's the job of other people. If they deliver a usable product that doesn't prevent anyone else from also doing so and thus achieving decentralization. But it would mean that they actually do their job for the billion they were given. [0] Calculated with today's Ether price, based on: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-foundation-holds-13b-in-ether-300m-in-non-crypto-investments/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...

yuan43 4y ago

It's a brilliant plan really. First, the Ethereum foundation premines the entire supply of ether, then distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale and the rest to miners. Eventually the Foundation produces an upgrade that replaces mining with validators posting collateral in the form of the very token that was premined. What the announcement doesn't say is how similar Ethereum will become to Ripple post-merge. Yes Ripple doesn't have anywhere near the fancy contract capabilities of Ethereum, nor does it have the concept of validators posting collateral or getting rewards. But in terms of where the power resides and the existence of major chokepoints, they're both very similar.

everfree 4y ago
> distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale Why the quotes? Did you miss the public launch announcement in 2015?

xyst 4y ago

bullish outlook. Heavily loaded up when ETH was at <$1K.

arez 4y ago
nobody cares what you bought
- stiltzkin 4y ago
  neither your comment.

kkielhofner 4y ago

What surprises me most about the Ethereum ecosystem is the software and release engineering of the implementations, especially the reference (now execution layer) go-ethereum. As has been noted elsewhere "the merge" has been in progress for years. Here we are approximately three weeks out and just this morning the (allegedly) working merge ready go-ethereum client was released. Given that the Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for 9/6 this gives the approximately 4500 Ethereum nodes (of which 3381 are geth)[0] 10 days to update... It also doesn't help that they botched the prior release (two days ago) of the geth client that had a nasty corruption issue that requires a little more than the update warning footnote in this release to fix[1]. Many people who deployed 1.10.22 are re-syncing from (almost) scratch. Even if you followed Prysm and the other Beacon implementations the deployment and configuration changes required are non-trivial[2] and again, the v3 release referenced in this announcement was only released two days ago! As someone who runs Ethereum nodes I'm a little gun shy at this point deploying new releases of this stack, especially given how things have gone the past two days. Even with our relatively trivial application this gives little time for any testing or assurance process. It's amazing to me given the stakes (value of the Ethereum chain) and complexity (huge) node operators are essentially in the position of waiting until mere days (or hours) to upgrade their nodes and as noted - there are thousands of us around the world. IMO this is yet another indication that the real issue with regard to decentralization of blockchain solutions is the fact that (as pointed out by Moxie and others) the vast majority of the real users and platforms of Ethereum interact with the chain via a handful of centralized node providers (Alchemy, Infura, etc). Who can blame them given what a mess this is? I'm also not picking on Ethereum specifically, the same things could be said about most of the other chains and implementations I've interacted with. Given the hype, promise, age, and value in the blockchain ecosystem the software itself makes Apache circa 1996 look like mature, rock solid software. BTW, the Ethereum Foundation alone holds approximately $1.6B in assets[3] and investors have poured tens of billions of dollars in this ecosystem. IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're wanting for resources to do this right. [0] - https://ethernodes.org/ https://ethernodes.org/ [1] - https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases [2] - https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prepare-for-merge https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prepare-for-merge [3] - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-foundation-holds-13b-in-ether-300m-in-non-crypto-investments/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...

rcarmo 4y ago

Thank goodness. I have been waiting for this to happen so I can consider building a couple of GPU powered machines at non-outrageous prices, and it seems that savvy miners have already begun selling part of their gear early.

overtonwhy 4y ago

And now there's a split where the miners keep mining and everybody gets a new duplicate coin account and the grifters cash out more?

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
No.
- overtonwhy 4y ago
  Look up Ethereum Classic. It is still running. Why is this any different?

tempnow987 4y ago

Ethernet is in the 12,000 megawatt energy usage range? Pretty impressive - and will be a nice savings if that energy usage goes away.

coolspot 4y ago
Ethernet? 12 GW? Maybe old coaxial 10Mbit cards.

targ65 4y ago

What are the chances that this doesn't end in disaster? Honest question.

endorphine 4y ago
Can you provide some examples?
everfree 4y ago
Chances are high that it will not end in disaster, in my opinion. They've simulated the switchover dozens of times on a diverse set of networks, including development ("shadow") forks of the main network itself.
dsimmons 4y ago
Many/most people "in the know" peg it somewhere in the ballpark of ~90-95% chance of success from what I've seen.

idiotsecant 4y ago

In this thread: A million crypto tribalists whatabouting and clutching pearls and absolutely nobody talking about what this is - a pretty cool organizational and technical achievement. Fantastically well done to the cat herders and cats that we call the Ethereum dev community, this is a prime example of how things can get done not by relying on the profit motive of a large corporation of the interests or a nation-state, but on the genuine belief in the soundness of an idea and a willingness to work together to change the world.

naltun 4y ago
Nicely said.
hartAtWork 4y ago
Amen

nailer 4y ago

If you were wondering: "The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees. " https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/

AgentME 4y ago
There are some old articles that get this wrong, because years ago it was planned that sharding support would get added at the same time as the shift to PoS (in an upgraded called "Eth2"), and sharding support would result in lower gas fees. Some articles mixed up the benefits of sharding and PoS with each other. But now sharding has been delayed so that the move to PoS could be prioritized.

jacobn 4y ago

Has there been any resolution to the issues raised in https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560070819518234624.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560070819518234624.html ? My reading of the concerns is that USDC has effective fork veto, and that with PoS the chain would be subject to OFAC, which would effectively destroy it. (my reading may well be incorrect / the concerns irrelevant)

sbierwagen 4y ago
If being subject to OFAC oversight would "destroy" Ethereum, then Ethereum should be destroyed.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Why is that? OFAC is a US government agency, Ethereum is not a US-based organization. Why should they be forced to follow US laws? There are plenty of us outside of the US who do not care about what's illegal in the US or not.
  - brobinson 4y ago
    You're misunderstanding his post. He's saying that if such a US-centric thing threatens the entire system, the system shouldn't exist at all. It will have failed at its mission to be decentralized and thus has no reason to exist.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    He's saying cryptocurrencies should be bigger than the US government. The system should be so resilient that there is no way for the USA or anyone else to intervene no matter how much they want to.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jcfrei 4y ago
If the majority of validators adhere to OFAC regulations then your chance of getting a transaction approved that violates OFAC drops. Anybody can be a validator but if the majority of validators choose to adhere to these rules then that's what you end up with. Crypto isn't successful because it creates some anarcho-capitalist alternative universe (though that was the initial impetus). And the die-hard bitcoin followers who believe so are slowly seeing their market cap falling below that of ether.

Seattle3503 4y ago

Does staking make Etherium deflationary? (or make it more deflationary if it already is)

everfree 4y ago
According to ultrasound.money, Ethereum's current 30d inflation rate is 4.1% annualized. If the merge were already behind us (flip the "simulate merge" switch), inflation would be 0.1%. So, not quite deflationary but pretty close. If Ethereum network usage picks up again like it did in 2021, Ethereum will experience long stretches of time where it is deflationary. https://ultrasound.money/ https://ultrasound.money/
- coolspot 4y ago
  Not sure this is correct. PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year, which can be offset with burn rate, but it is at 0.5% now. The site projects that in 200 years, burn and issuance will be at equilibrium.
  - everfree 4y ago
    > PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year PoS issuance is 4.6%/year per staked ETH. Only 14M of the total 120M ETH are staked right now, making the real issuance only 0.5%/year when taken as a percentage of total ETH supply. Subtract the 0.5% burn rate from that 0.5% real issuance rate (with rounding errors), and that's how you get Ethereum's current situation of being "pretty close" to deflationary.
    - coolspot 4y ago
      Thank you for explaining! Will gas fees burn or go to stakers?
      - everfree 4y ago
        Part is burned, part goes to stakers. EIP-1559 is the Ethereum patch that introduced the fee burn in Aug 2021. It's a bit complex, but basically speaking, the higher demand is for the network, the more expensive transactions become and the more ETH gets burned.

dang 4y ago

Related. Others? The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 - Aug 2022 (387 comments) Proof-of-Stake is better than Proof-of-Work; the Merge won’t fix other problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 - Aug 2022 (44 comments) “The Merge,” the biggest change in Ethereum history - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 - Aug 2022 (15 comments) The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519340 - Aug 2022 (175 comments) Ethereum merge on schedule after successful Goerli test merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429380 - Aug 2022 (1 comment) Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of-stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32427992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32427992 - Aug 2022 (310 comments) Will GPU mining end after the Merge (formerly called ETH 2.0)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048468 - July 2022 (35 comments) Ethereum Proof-of-Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012352 - July 2022 (326 comments) Ethereum mining is going away, and miners are not happy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31772418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31772418 - June 2022 (23 comments) Why Proof of Stake? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006793 - Nov 2020 (35 comments) Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814409 - Jan 2019 (11 comments) Proof of Stake or Proof of Work, What's the Difference? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369593 - Nov 2018 (107 comments) Ethereum Foundation Releases Alpha Casper Proof of Stake Testnet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042070 - Dec 2017 (199 comments) Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054903 - Aug 2017 (120 comments) Proof of Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13001511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13001511 - Nov 2016 (77 comments) Long Read: Alternatives for Proof of Work, Part 1: Proof of Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091773 - Aug 2015 (3 comments)

sfjailbird 4y ago
The news here is that there is now a (sort of) fixed date (next month!). Not really related to general stories about the merge or proof-of-stake, imho.

yyyk 4y ago

If this works well enough, I wonder how long before governments decide to straight up ban large PoW chains.

IncRnd 4y ago

If anyone wonders why many "regular people" are uncertain about doing anything with cryptocurrencies, look at the top of this article for the reason. It's not that people are incapable of understanding the subject, but that the purveyors of the subject constantly coin new words and meanings. * Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total Difficulty value. * The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain – 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. * The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022. * Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022.

simpleblend 4y ago
1. This is mostly for developers 2. The iPhone was once new. Electric vehicles were once new. People will adapt.
dsimmons 4y ago
To be fair, I think this is mainly aimed at developers (and ETH ecosystem developers specifically). While I don't disagree that there's a "vocabulary" problem (e.g. "dank-sharding"), in a perfect world, a normie would largely just interact with an application without needing to know any of this.
- beambot 4y ago
  Spot on: This underlying infrastructure isn't meant for "regular people", it's meant for the people who directly build atop it. By way of example from TradFi, the news updates from SWIFT about ISO-20022 is similarly laden with jargon: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/iso-20022-bytes-payments-less-six-months-till-cbpr-general-go-live https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/iso-20022-bytes-payme...
- IncRnd 4y ago
  You say that from the standpoint of readers at this HN blog page, but this blog post is the top blog post and first one seen on https://blog.ethereum.org/ https://blog.ethereum.org/. Many people who want to understand what they are looking at prior to purchase would look at this page and quickly close it, never to invest using etherium. Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every page on the website (or app store) is filled with made-up jargon? That's the issue that I see here.

hartAtWork 4y ago

Can I unstake my staked eth after this merge?

wmf 4y ago
No, you have to wait for a future protocol upgrade.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
Nope.